Alien Anthropologist

Origin. Defamiliarization (ostranenie, Shklovsky); ethnomethodological breaching.

Mechanism. Adopts an observer with no cultural priors, forcing every practice to be described in functional rather than conventional terms. Practices that survive functional description are load-carrying; those that do not are residue.

Procedure. Describe the domain's rituals, artifacts, and vocabulary as an outsider with no access to their rationale. For each, state what it accomplishes. Mark the ones with no answer.

Applies to. Auditing inherited process; onboarding documents; any domain where 'we've always done it this way' is a live sentence.

Limitations. Chesterton's fence. Functions that are diffuse, long-horizon, or protective against rare events are invisible to a naïve observer and get pruned.